> "The crazy stat is that Europe makes more from fining US tech companies than they do from taxing their own technology companies."
That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.
I don't even agree with what the Italian government did, but more companies need to do this instead of lobbying for or against laws. No one elected you. The loud voice and influence you wield because of success as a commercial entity does not entitle you a louder voice and power than the citizens of that country. Pull out, if the Italian people don't like the result, they can work on getting things changed. They didn't vote for @eastdakota
Same goes for apple, google, microsoft, signal, twitter, etc.. I fear what all these have in common is the parasitical oligarchy in the US where companies, CEOs and billionaires puppeting the government with the string for everyone to see (what will anyone do about it?), and it doesn't even register for a moment that there is anything abnormal or harmful about it.
In a democracy, the person who controls popular opinion is the ultimate ruler. That person is supposed to be other citizens as individuals.
plus it will kill their company forever across Europe
DO IT!
(and if the Italians are worried about the olympics, just wait a month and then do it)
It’s been known since the ancient Greeks democracy results in oligarchy. It’s why the US was setup as a republic.
Exercise to the reader why everyone thinks democracy is an unassailable good in the world.
ahem, he's from Utah duh bro
The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"
I think you may have this backwards.
To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.
To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
No support. No responses to emails or requests for a review by a human
They also sent a notice to my hosting provider. My hosting provider promptly looked at my site and closed the ticket. It was pretty clear to anyone that the report was malicious.
So yes, Cloudflare censors (to quote Matthew Prince) with "No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency"
Granted this could be just due to lack of staff and support
In this case your priors are wrong and the parties you should cheer for are reversed.
This captcha huckster has delusions of grandeur.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-17/concern-over-asic-int...
They didn’t repeal the law but instead worked out better ways of using the existing powers after a review.
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/austra...
€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
Because piracy is winning.
Its the only way to build a video streaming system that has everything. And its a better user experience for everyone...
Well, other than rights holders.
Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
Naturally "rightsholders" abuse this often.
It's essentially a Dachverband of ISPs, bypassing all legal requirements and the judicative system to block domains across all ISPs.
There's this kid who found out about it and scraped their API, then created the cuiiliste [dot] de website where you can check what kind of domains are blocked by ISPs.
The verfassungsblog wrote about it, too, from a legal perspective [1] (German).
Why the 6 days old news OP?
Edit: Actually, Cloudflare may have an indirect point in that I also think that access to information should be free. Nonetheless this still does not invalidate what Europe SHOULD do. But the politicians in the EU are not very clever, so ...
Sports conglomerates and their lobbying should kindly fuck off.
If they want to sue a site the old fashioned web for IP infringement that's fine. But that 30 minute thing is absolute bullshit.
Heck, HN expressly called on Cloudflare to take up this exact fight[0]; and now that they have, they've still, somehow, managed to turn most of HN against them.
How is that even possible?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41890460 ("Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law (arstechnica.com)"; 9 months ago, 175 comments)
Top-rated comment: "It's one of the rare cases where the sheer size and international influence of companies like Google and Cloudflare can actually do some good for the world by fighting back against such laws."
Most of HN is against Cloudflare by default. They didn't 'turn' anything in this specific event.
The twitter rant complete with some weird AI generated image doesn't help.
> Yet the core issue is infrastructural. For years, Europe has allowed vital parts of the internet to fall into the hands of American companies
Or, is the core infrastructural issue that for the past 20+ years Internet protocols have stalled, yielding capabilities almost exclusively to centralized (and apparently highly concentrated) commercial services.
perihelions•50m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760 ("Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines (twitter.com/eastdakota)"; 1104 comments)
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-...